Sunday, January 30, 2011

Ugh, the attempts we've had on 25 man on Chimaeron have been painful. Melf says it's not a healer fight, it's a dps fight, but really it is a healer fight I think.

I think the hardest part for me is that it's a fight where I feel totally useless. You have to keep the raid about 10k, but with hots it takes me about 3-5 seconds to do that, but we really need to get heals out under 2 seconds because some people get hit with caustic slime and then if you get hit with a massacre soon after then they go splat.

I read a couple of forums, some of which said it was a druid unfriendly fight, and that they are best left on tank heals while everyone else does raid.

Phase 2 however is a bit different, we have to time all our mass healing cooldowns so we can hit as many people as possible, as everyone has to stand together and get healed up before we get hit by poison bombs.

So far I haven't been able to coordinate the healers properly for it. And being so disheartened over it I haven't really felt like it, but I think I'll have to start taking a more active role in allocating. Melfina always makes things hard during raid because he always knows best and doesn't listen to what I say (because he's done it before - though we have our suspicions!)... but I guess I'll just have to go with druid on tanks, and break it up into groups again for healing.

Feraltree had some nice healtips - have a read. Gonna add that Low Health debuff and see if it works.

Phase 2 was just nuts healing, I managed to save my tranquility for that phase, but I didn't manage to get a tree form off, I had used it in the previous phases.

Blue vial - frost phase - spread out and heal up the person ice blocked
Red vial - fire phase - stay together, one person will get the fire debuff on them and they have to run out and heal them up because they take extra fire damage
Green vial - poison phase - everyone including adds takes 100% extra damage. So the dps aoe the adds down, and we healers heal our frigging guts out. I went tree form for this phase.

There are other non healing related things in this encounter - like Remedy which causes him to heal himself (which can be spell stolen I believe) and adds being spawned which can be interrupted. There are also a number of arcane storms which do lots of damage but we didn't have the interrupts to stop most of those.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

This fight honestly looked like it was never going to get there. 4 golems, 2 of which are active at one time and then shutting down and the next golem becoming active seemed like a crazy run around nutcase fight. But there was method in the madness and we managed to get it down.

I have to admit it took me a little while to understand which golem did what, especially arcanotron and electron, they seemed rather similar to me. But I can talk about it now from a healing point of view now that I have gotten my head around it.

Magmatron is the fire one, and he does this flame AOE which smacks everyone in the room. That part was healer heavy for me. He also did the red line focus attack which causes a line of flames to damage heavily on one target and everyone has to get out of the red line or they will get flamed. I used my tree form for this phase, and it was great throwing LB everywhere and using my free heals on everyone who needed the extra topups. The best thing was that it was exactly 3 minutes between activations so everytime Magmatron was up I could go tree form!

Electron does the chain lightning. Had to remind myself to spread out for that one. Healing that wasn't too horrible, I just wish people would stand still so i didn't have to keep moving around to avoid the chained lightning.

Arcanotron put some pools on the ground that regenerate mana. It was bad when Electron was up and we couldn't bunch up together, but I did try to stand in them as much as possible. You just hope that the tank pulled him out of those blue pools on the ground otherwise there would be tons of damage.

Toxitron puts out poison clouds and then spawns adds which target people and then those targetted people have to kite the mobs around while people kill them. It was pretty easy as long as I wasn't kiting.

I also did tank healing on Hyad to keep my LB up and free heals and with the shamans dropping Mana tide every time it was up, that helped a lot. I didn't OOM much, though I did use my innervate every time it was up on myself as well as getting the Mana tide help.

The best thing was... I was in the top 2 healing for that fight. Ahead of the priests! Not sure why that was but that was the only fight I think a druid can do well in - with the constant moving and all my instants that was probably what did it. According to my heal meter I was top, according to Beldarien's I was second. Either way I was up there, and I was pretty damn proud of myself.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

I never realised that 2 of my favourite druid blogs TreeBarkJacket and Revive and Rejuvenate were both Queenslanders. And here I was thinking that the whole time they were Americans.

Both have had a bit of decreased activity on their blogs and have had some soul searching I think because of the Queensland floods. I think the sitting in front of their computers while people have no home or have even lost family members to floods has made them feel like they should do more with their lives or maybe help.

There are entries about the floods in their blogs, and having read both of them I couldn't help but make a small comment in my blog as well.

Amazing what you can do when you stop focussing on dps! Fue decided to just focus on movement so we could get the movement down right and that seemed to work - that and also we decided not to bunch up as ranged, and rather run into melee when we had a meteor. That made it heaps easier for the other debuff which causes the aoe damage when you heal or do damage.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Got Magmar down on Sunday night, which is actually quite an easy fight to do.

Big lava worm, who does lots of aoe damage and then does a pillar of fire so everyone has to run away from it, and after the pillar all these worms come out which have to be dps'd down before they get to the raid. Wash rinse repeat, until Magmar bites the tank and holds the tank in his mouth and then 3 dps jump on Magmar's head and chain it to the ground and then everyone can do free dps to the head for a while. Then Magmar breaks free and we start all over again.

So for a 25 man raid I put the pallies on the MT with one of the shamans and everyone is on raid. I tree form after the first pillar and then when the tank's in the mouth I get the shamans to mana tide for the healers and dps. Then when the CD is up again we do it again (at a later repeat of that cycle).

Pallies and priests are the big healers for the raids. I find I am only just ahead of the shamans for healing on the charts.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Yesterday had a bit of a shock when one of the new recruits was telling me about his gear and his stats. I have been running around with 5.6k spellpower and 2600 spi and trying for 12% haste, and he told me that he had read lots of forums and that regen doesn't matter much and it's all about spellpower. It annoyed me actually and I decided that I would look into the whole thing a bit more.

Cannot be Tamed had some nice tables about haste. I then realised I had too much haste for raid healing, so I might be able to undo some of my haste a bit. Haste not only reduces my GCD to 1s (which is not achievable atm - I think you need 5489/6403 haste rating (with 5%/without)) but makes my hots tick more, so more haste = more ticks. Haste break points were listed in his blog, and 1423 is a nice number for raid healing (with 5% buff), because with that I can get a 1 extra tick of Regrowth (5), as well as 2 extra ticks off LB (12) and 1 extra tick of Rejuvenation (5) and one extra tick of Wild growth (8). Looks like I might drop some haste.

But I realised that almost every healer seems to be walking around with 6.5k+ spell power, and it was only me who was gimped. So I swapped out all my spirit trinkets and wore only the spell power ones, regemmed a lot of prismatic slots to spell power and replaced all my green level gems with blue level ones. Now I feel a bit better with spell power sitting around 6.1k, just need a nicer ring and bracers.

I copied his spec to raid the other day, and gave it a try. I was 0/3/38 before and went to 8/2/31 dropping points in NS, swift rejuv and improved rejuv, and keeping Nature's bounty. I decided I didn't like that and it is hopeless for PVP, so I respecced and took the points out of Nature's bounty and put them back into the other 3. I think Moonglow really does make a difference with healing and I do try and cast Healing touch every time Nature's grace procs, since HT is now under 2secs with that.

Friday, January 7, 2011

5th January was the day of our first raid. And we decided to go tackle Bastion of Twilight, in Twilight Highlands.

The first boss, Halfus Wyrmbreaker at first seemed impossible to heal. And my limited understanding of the fight was: Here is Wyrmbreaker, with all these chained Drakes and a cage of whelps, and you talk to 2 of them and then you have to fight him and them!

On further scrutiny the only dragons I knew that they released was the Slate dragon, which makes Halfus do Malevolent strikes, a stacking debuff on tanks which causes them to take less healing, hence needing a tank swap. And the other was Nether Scion which I have no idea what it did.

Healing the first few attempts was a nightmare. Tanks dropped like flies and the cooldowns they blew did not help them at all. The pull and first 20 seconds were heavy tank damage times from what I could tell. By the time we did a successful attempt (or at least a positive attempt) I figured I should go tree in that part and then I could also go tree at the end as well, because the fight was long enough.

However, I was pleased that I managed to squeeze out some half decent healing with my funny spec (respecced for raid, but I am not sure I like it - took Moonglow and dropped NS and the rejuvenation talents). We had 3 paladins healing the tanks (Bel, Schnaptim, McTacky) as well as 2 priests (Melf, Cymre) and 1 shaman (Targetme) in addition to myself.

I even got loot! Wyrmbreaker's Amulet! Melfina got Robes of the Burning Acolyte and Manbull got Malevolence, Epidemais got Book of Binding Will and Lacrox got a BOE drop (Heaving Plates of Protection) as well as Bracers of Impossible Strength.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Interestingly I had both my professions at 521 and had them maxed in a single session (2 separate sessions each profession that is) after struggling to get there... this is how I did it.

Enchanting
I have been enchanting everything onto scrolls. I had a lot of cloak enchants for intellect and bracer enchants for spirit and glove enchants for expertise. Then one day a guildie asked me for a weapon enchant and I had the recipe, and he flew all the way to Deepholm to get it, and when he got there, I realised I didn't have the Elementium Rod to be able to do it! Just as I was about to send him away I realised I actually had the rod in the bank and hadn't done the enchant, so I got him to wait, and made my new rod which was worth 5 skillups (!!) and that pushed me over to 525. So my suggestion is to wait till you get to 520 and then make your enchanting rod.

Tailoring
I had just made one of the pvp items (Emberfire boots?) and then someone was in trade channel asking to buy someone's cooldowns. Now all my cooldowns except for the Hyjal one was up, so I said I could do them but I wouldn't be able to make the item until I had done the 4 cloth for them, as each dreamcloth made was a skill up for me. The person wanted the belt, and they had the mats for almost 4 cloth, but I used some of my own water to make the dreamcloth. So making the 4 dreamcloth with someone else's mats put me to 525 and then I went and bought the recipe they wanted and made their belt. Which they then paid me 900g for (which covered the cost of my waters plus a tip for me) so that was a really great way to level my last few points of tailoring and I made money out of it too!

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Ascendant Descending
Lord Obsidius makes 3 shadows which are kited away by a ranged dps (warlock and mage have done it for me so far) so that he doesn't channel onto other people. Every now and then the boss swaps with one of his shadows and then the tank has to grab the new boss and the old shadow gets taken away by the kiter. Just make sure you keep dispels up on the kiter so he doesn't get slowed, but other than that it is an easy achievement.

Prince of Tides

No Static at All

Kill it with Fire!
In the 2nd phase of High prophet Barim the phoenix leaves some flame trails and then soul fragments from one of the players forms and moves towards the phoenix to heal it. If you kite the fragments through the flames they turn into burning souls and then they will die. Healing it is a bitch I found if people are all over the place, tree form with my multi person LBs and then using my regrowth on every clearcasting proc was very effective. Ranged stack together is best too, hard with the melee I think as they're busy dpsing the dark phoenix. We accidentally got this achievement.
Headed South

Straw that Broke the Camel's back
Mounting the camel during this fight allows you to run and cast. All you have to do is not get hit by Earthspike or Quicksand during this fight and you'll get the achievement. Healing wise being on a camel is great because you can run while casting. Just be aware of your surroundings. During the adds phase (when Ptah is submerged) just make sure you run to where people are with your adds so they can kill them.

Faster than The Speed of Light

Ready for Raiding

Prototype Prodigy
The prototype reaper needs to go down and hit the molten slag (?) adds that spawn at the bottom. Since the reaper is immune to fire damage it shouldn't take any damage and the 1-1-2 rotation works nicely to keep the adds stunned and then killed to make sure they don't get up to the rest of the group who are up the top fighting with the boss. The Foe Reaper does do damage to it though so don't let it get hit by that during the enounter.

I'm on a Diet
Cookie throws good and bad food in his encounter on the ground. The idea is to eat a good food followed by a bad food. Just get the tank to do this while you are healing (I tried to do it when I was healing and I stuffed up and ate 2 bad foods in a row), so this is actually quite an easy achievement to do. The tank may eat a few bad foods in which case they'll need a bit of healing.

Pardon Denied

Bullet Time

Crushing Bones and Cracking Skulls
Did this with a mage. Adds spawn after quake, run them to the tank who is tanking the boss, and then when the boss is about to do his Skullcracker ability, frost nova them in place and run away from the chains before he Skullcrackers you! Healing a bit more intensive when adds are out, but a nicely placed Efflorescence and WG during that phase gets you through it easily. Do that twice and you should get all the adds.
Too Hot to Handle

Old Faithful

Rotten to the Core

Extra Credit Bonus Stage
This was very easy. 2 of the orbs are easy to get - they're near the 2 aoe orbs on a bridge that blow you away. There are 2 with the second boss that you use the whirlwinds to get (we got both of those) and there are a few later on which you can simply jump off and get. I read that there are about 8 or 9 you can get so this is an easy achievement.

Well, first day all to ourselves yesterday with no kids so me and Hyad did a ton of heroics (I think we did 5 and one normal - Halls of Origination, Throne of Tides and Vortex Pinnacle twice, Blackrock, and Lost city normal). And we did our quests as well.

The best part was I got some upgrades!

I got a ring (Kibble) and neck (Quicksilver amulet) from Blackrock, I got a relic (Captured lightning) from Vortex Pinnacle! I did see it drop before on the first VP I did but Xarek took it, he'd been trying to get it for ages.

Now we decided also to do some mindless stuff yesterday so we helped Xarek get his Glory of the Hero and get his Red Protodrake. One of the achievements we did was rather interesting.

He didn't have Amber Void, so we were going to do that. But then Tacky decided to join and he didn't have any of the Voids (Amber, Emerald or Ruby Void) so for fun we thought we'd get off the drakes for the last boss and dps it down from the platform.

The first attempt was abyssmal, with me healing and the 2 pallies and Lushnek dpsing and Hyad tanking. They couldn't reach him. So for the next attempt we decided to have me and Lushnek boomkin and the 2 pallies healing and Hyad tanking.

And we did it!

I screenshotted Tacky's achievements so you could see that we did Ruby, Amber and Emerald void all together. I thought that was a pretty cool achievement.